As roads progressively crowd with vehicles, and landscape increasingly crowds with roads and associated visual and other distractions, automated safety systems associated with vehicles to protect drivers, passengers and others, have taken on a large role in attempting to forgive dangerous driver-fault and vehicle-fault errors. Proper and safe vehicle steering fits into this picture of safety concern, and the present invention takes aim at this issue.
In particular, this invention pertains to automated, but driver-overridable, “guide-by-wire” vehicle steering which is associated with specially prepared vehicle lanes in a roadway, or a roadway system, and to vehicles which have been uniquely adapted, or equipped, to make use of the invention. The invention is characterized by both systemic and methodologic aspects.
The concept of “guide-by-wire” behavior involving the present invention essentially refers to the fact that the invention contemplates the relatively simple installation, as a structure buried in a groove cut along, and accurately following, a vehicle lane in a roadway surface, of an elongate, passive, linear, “wire-like” infrastructure which is either (a) electrically conductive and electromagnetically responsive in a continuous sense along its length, or alternatively (b), intermittently conductive and electromagnetically responsive in the “visual sense” of a dashed line—an intermittent structure which might, for example, include an elongate element possessing spaced conductive elements and interposed spaces which are non-conductive. Such a “dashed-line” structure is also referred to herein as being a stepped-intermittent electrical conductor.
With respect to this proposed, elongate infrastructure which is to be buried-installed, i.e., ultimately covered over, in an elongate, small-dimension groove cut into a roadway surface, generally speaking along the centerline of a vehicle traffic lane, this infrastructure is, per se, and as was mentioned above, a passive structure in the sense that it is not energized to originate any kind of an electrical/electromagnetic signal. It is, however, capable of responding to an electromagnetic field by responsively, effectively re-radiating such a field. This infrastructure is also referred to herein as a responder.
Equipped in appropriately prepared (i.e., system-equipped) vehicles which are intended to make use of the features of this invention is an on-board, signal-controllable, automated, steering-control mechanism which can be overridden selectively by a driver, or, in a converse sense, intermittently activated by a driver. This automated steering-control mechanism is designed to respond to appropriately linked electrical control signals which effectively issue steering commands to a “prepared” vehicle's steering system so as to cause that vehicle to follow a steering-controlled path of travel as defined by the buried, linear infrastructure. Such vehicle preparation may involve either originally installed vehicle equipment, or later-installed, retrofit equipment.
Feeding steering information, by way of the mentioned, appropriate electrical control signals, to this automated steering-control mechanism, through a suitable interconnect structure, is a vehicle-on-board circuitry arrangement in the form of laterally-triangulating, electromagnetically-responsive triangulation structure. The term “triangulation structure” is intended to refer to any position-locating structure which is capable of determining the lateral position of a vehicle in a vehicle travel lane. One form of such structure is specifically disclosed herein.
This triangulation structure is an active, “vehicle-on-board” electronic structure that transmits, downwardly toward an invention-prepared roadway underlying an equipped and prepared vehicle, relatively conventional, electromagnetic-field signals, such as conventional metal-detection signals. It does this via a pair of laterally spaced transmission/reception devices borne on the vehicle. Any appropriate, conventional, metal-detection form of such signals may be employed. These transmission/reception devices preferably each takes the form of conventional, metal-detection transceiver devices. This on-board circuitry arrangement looks for reflection-return (re-radiated) signals (from the buried infrastructure), from which return signals a triangulation is performed to produce an output steering-control signal that is indicative of a vehicle's lateral position relative to the buried infrastructure.
The idea, of course, is that, with the system of this invention implemented, and its methodology in use, steering of a vehicle so that the vehicle remains properly laterally positioned, at least within certain lateral drift tolerances, relative to a vehicle travel lane, may be controlled completely by the interaction which takes place between the buried elongate conductive infrastructure, and the laterally triangulating circuitry arrangement which sends the mentioned control output signals to direct vehicle steering.
Multiple-lane installations of buried infrastructure may, of course, be employed, and as will be mentioned below herein, it is entirely possible to implement a system wherein control signals associated with different vehicle lanes, and with different vehicle-flow directions, are distinguishable.
These and various other features and advantages of, and offered by, the present invention, such as the communication to a vehicle of selected non-position roadway information, will become more fully apparent as the detailed description which follows below is read in conjunction with the several drawings.